The Real Story of Germanwings Flight 9525

One year after a young pilot crashed a German airliner into the remote French Alps—a suicide and mass homicide that transfixed and horrified the world—Joshua Hammer investigates what really happened that day

Jean-Sébastien Beaud didn't know what he'd find when he descended, by a rope dangling from a helicopter, onto a steep mountainside in the French Alps. Twenty minutes earlier, Beaud and three colleagues from the mountain rescue squad of the gendarmerie had received a call from an air-traffic control center in Lyon, telling them that a plane had disappeared from the radar screen over the Massif des Trois-Évêchés, a range of 9,000-foot peaks northwest of Nice. Now, at 11:10 A.M. on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, Beaud was lowered from the four-seat chopper and set down gently on the rock face. Plumes of smoke and small flames rose from debris scattered across the slope, and the odor of jet fuel thickened the air around him. A tall and athletic man in his early thirties, with a faint mustache and goatee, Beaud moved cautiously down the field of black scree, making a mental inventory of what he saw: a human torso, shoes, suitcases, seats, bits of fuselage, and everywhere, detached hands and feet. He could tell immediately that an aircraft had smashed full speed into the mountain and been obliterated. Rattled but focused on the task at hand, he clicked on his radio and notified headquarters: There could not possibly be any survivors.

Moments later, Beaud came across the plane's registration plate, which he noted was German. He crossed the slope and worked his way up a gully to the likely point of impact. He was under orders not to touch any evidence, so each time he encountered a fragment of a human being—including, horrifically, a few scattered faces that had peeled off skulls like masks—he planted a small colored peg in the ground. Twenty-five minutes after he landed on the mountainside, he spotted a rectangular orange object about the size of a shoebox. Bending down, he was astonished to realize that it was the cockpit voice recorder, damaged but intact. “So often you hear about them searching for three or four days for the box, and this was recovered in less than half an hour,” he told me one recent morning as he led me around the crash site, his first time back in nearly nine months. “It was all a bit of luck.”

Beaud radioed his colleagues with news of what he'd found, and within hours, a team of forensic specialists flew the device to Marseille and then on to Paris. For the next several days, Beaud and others searching for clues in the debris remained at the site, and Beaud even spent a night camped among the carnage. As he lay in a tent in the blackness, surrounded by utter silence, he thought of the passengers and their last minutes of terror. “I could imagine what they went through,” he recalled, “and it was hard to sleep.”

But the mystery of what brought down Flight 9525 wouldn't be solved on the mountain. Within 36 hours of Beaud's discovery, French authorities would analyze the voice recorder—and discern the almost incomprehensible truth behind the crash.

Part I: Before

Two hours before Beaud was lowered onto that hillside, the Germanwings gate staff at Terminal 2 in Barcelona's El Prat Airport began the boarding process for Flight 9525. Martyn Matthews, a 50-year-old engineer for the German auto-parts giant Huf, was among the first of the 144 passengers to board, taking a seat at the front of the plane. Matthews, a soccer fan, hiker, and father of two grown children, was heading home via Düsseldorf to his wife of 25 years in Wolverhampton, a city in the British Midlands. Maria Radner, a prominent opera singer who had just finished a gig performing Richard Wagner's Siegfried in Barcelona, sat in row 19, along with her partner, Sascha Schenk, an insurance broker, and their toddler son, Felix. Sixteen high school students and two teachers from the German town of Haltern am See, exhausted after a weeklong exchange program, filled up the rear rows of the full flight. The students included Lea Drüppel, a gregarious 15-year-old with dreams of being a professional musician and stage actress, and her best friend and next-door neighbor, Caja Westermann, also 15.

The Airbus sat at the gate for 26 minutes past its scheduled departure time of 9:35, then taxied to the runway and took off, rising over the city and banking gently toward the Mediterranean Sea. From the cockpit, Captain Patrick Sondenheimer, a veteran with 6,000 hours in the air, apologized for the delay and promised to try to make up the lost time en route. At one point, Sondenheimer mentioned to his co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, that he forgot to go to the bathroom before they boarded. “Go any time,” Lubitz told him. At 10:27, after the Airbus had reached its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, Sondenheimer told Lubitz to begin preparing for landing (it was only a two-hour flight), a routine that included gauging the fuel levels, ensuring that the flaps and landing gear were working, and checking the latest airport and weather information. Lubitz's response was cryptic. “Hopefully,” he said. “We'll see.” It's unclear if Sondenheimer noted his co-pilot's odd language, but he said nothing in response. A minute later, Sondenheimer pushed his seat back, opened the cockpit door, closed it behind him, and ducked into the lavatory. It was 10:30 A.M.

Andreas Günter Lubitz, known to his family as Andy, had always wanted to fly. He grew up in Montabaur, a prosperous town of 12,000 located midway between Düsseldorf and Frankfurt, in the green hills of southwest Germany. The firstborn son of Günter Lubitz, a banker, and his wife, Ursula, a piano teacher who played the organ at church, he was a quiet child with a crew cut and a sweet smile. Passionate from boyhood about becoming a pilot, Lubitz papered his bedroom with posters from Airbus, Boeing, and Lufthansa. He also became an expert glider pilot, spending many weekends at a flying club in Montabaur. An advertisement that Lufthansa placed on the back of his high school yearbook asked: “Do you want to make your dream of flying a reality?” To Lubitz, a disciplined student who was voted “third-most orderly” of his graduating class of 2007, the answer was yes. He applied to join the company's flight academy straight out of high school and in 2008 was among the 5 percent of applicants accepted into the program.

That September, Lubitz joined 200 candidates at the Lufthansa Flight Training Pilot School in Bremen, in northern Germany, where students study aviation theory for a year before putting it into practice at flight-training school in Arizona. But in November, just a couple of months into the program, he dropped out and returned home. Two months after that, a Montabaur psychiatrist diagnosed Lubitz as suffering from a “deep depressive episode,” with thoughts of suicide, and treated him with intense psychotherapy and with Cipralex and mirtazapine, two powerful antidepressants. The psychiatrist (whose name is protected by German privacy law) attributed the collapse in part to “modified living conditions,” meaning the move to Bremen and the separation from his parents and younger brother. Lubitz's family would tell investigators that he had developed in his new environment an “unfounded fear of failure.” The breakdown was accompanied, according to case files generated by a prosecutor in Düsseldorf*,* by tinnitus, a near-constant ringing in his ears—a symptom that is often associated with depression.

Lubitz spent nine months in the psychiatrist's care. In July 2009, only six months into the treatment, the doctor declared that “a considerable remission had been obtained” with the meds and recommended in a letter to German aviation officials that Lubitz be allowed to resume his training in Bremen: “Patient alert and mentally fully oriented, with no retentivity or memory disorders. Mr. Lubitz completely recovered, there is not any residuum remained. The treatment has been finished.” Yet the doctor continued to treat Lubitz—and prescribe him powerful drugs—through October, three months after having assured officials that Lubitz had fully recovered. German aviation officials took several more months to restore Lubitz's student pilot's license and his fit-to-fly medical certificate, amending them with the designation SIC, for “specific regular examination.” This notation would stay on Lubitz's record. Any further psychiatric treatment for depression, any more meds, would result in his automatic grounding. As Lubitz was surely aware, this would almost certainly mean the end of his flying career.

Lubitz completed his Bremen training in early 2010 and then, in preparation for the four-month session at the Lufthansa-owned flight school in Arizona, filled out a student-pilot document required by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Asked on the form if he had ever been diagnosed with “mental disorders of any sort, depression, anxiety, etc.,” Lubitz lied. He ticked off “no,” then left blank the space below, in which he was required to detail any medical treatment he had received over the past three years. But the lie was caught. Four days after Lubitz submitted the form to the FAA, an aviation doctor in Germany who vets documents for the U.S. agency spotted Lubitz's false statement and reported it. Lying on an FAA application can land a pilot in jail for perjury or get him permanently barred from flying. In Lubitz's case, though, the falsehood delayed, but didn't derail, the process. “We are unable to establish your eligibility to hold an airman medical certificate at this time,” responded an FAA official. “Due to your history of reactive depression, please submit a current detailed status report from your prescribing physician.” In other words, Lubitz was given a second shot—and this time, he came clean, admitting his history of depression and complying with the request for a doctor's report. Apparently this was enough to satisfy the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Weeks later, he was on his way to Arizona.

At the training school in Goodyear, outside Phoenix, Lubitz racked up 100 hours of flight-training time—some in a Beechcraft Bonanza, a six-seat plane, some on a flight simulator—then returned to Germany in the spring of 2011 to continue his training on jets while working as a flight attendant for Lufthansa (a typical step on the path to becoming a pilot). There were no further documented mental problems, and in the fall of 2013 he joined Germanwings, advancing quickly to first officer and co-piloting short flights in Germany and Western Europe.

The SIC notation on Lubitz's medical records required Lufthansa's AeroMedical Center to examine him regularly for depression, but it remains unclear how often Lubitz was required to report to Lufthansa doctors, and how thoroughly he was examined. A 2012 report by a United Nations regulatory group criticized the lack of screening in the airline industry for mental illness among younger pilots, declaring that the “traditional medical examination” being used to inspect them was wholly inadequate to detect psychological troubles. A New York attorney named Brian Alexander, a licensed pilot who is pursuing a class-action suit on behalf of families of the Germanwings victims, says that such exams are notoriously lax. “There is a flaw in the system, allowing ‘self-reporting’ and concealment,” he told me recently. “You fill out this bullshit questionnaire, you lie, and you are off to the races.”

In 2013, his career on the rise, Lubitz moved into a luxury apartment in Düsseldorf with his girlfriend, a teacher named Kathrin Goldbach, who would later describe their relationship as “stable and harmonious.” They made plans to marry and have two children. Lubitz returned on occasional weekends to Montabaur, where he stayed with his parents and ran half marathons, sometimes with his father. Colleagues and friends described him as showing all of the qualities that one would want in a commercial pilot: He was, according to the Düsseldorf prosecutor's files, “quiet, competitive, determined, and diligent.”

But Lubitz's stability wouldn't last. Major depressive disorder affects about one in six men, and at least 50 percent of those who recover will experience one or more recurrences. In Lubitz's case, the relapse appears to have begun just before Christmas 2014. At first, though, it manifested with psychosomatic symptoms: Lubitz was certain he was going blind. He began visiting ophthalmologists and neurologists at the rate of three or four appointments a week, complaining that he was seeing stars, halos, flashes of light, streaks, and flying insects. He was also suffering from light sensitivity and double vision. “He was full of fear,” one ophthalmologist noted. Doctors examined his eyes and brain using a variety of state-of-the-art equipment, but found nothing wrong. One neurologist diagnosed him with a “hypochondriacal disorder.” Lubitz, according to the doctor's records (as summarized by the Düsseldorf prosecutor), “repeated with remarkable frequency and detail the nature of the symptoms affecting his vision, and was unable to accept suggestions of alternative diagnoses, including ones positing psychological causes. In fact, he broke off treatment at this point.” His family doctor diagnosed an “emergent psychosis” and urged him to check himself into a psychiatric clinic. Lubitz ignored her.

Gradually, however, Lubitz seemed to accept that his worsening vision could have psychological causes. In January, his mother reached out to the Montabaur psychiatrist who had treated Lubitz for nine months several years earlier. That month, he returned to the doctor's clinic for the first time since 2009. The prosecutor's files indicate that the psychiatrist knew Lubitz's depression had returned. Lubitz began psychotherapy and—even as he continued his normal work and flight schedule—again took the powerful meds mirtazapine and lorazepam. Following doctor's orders, he began to record his positive thoughts in what he called a glückstagesbuch—roughly translated as a “happiness diary.” Lubitz had been tormented by insomnia, but he reported some improvement under treatment. “Three and a half hours of deep sleep,” he wrote on one occasion. “Slept for four hours a stretch,” he noted in another entry.

German privacy laws are generally restrictive, but they do allow psychiatrists to notify relevant parties (including an employer) if they believe a patient could present a danger to the lives of others. But in a decision that would have dire consequences, Lubitz's doctor seems to have made no such attempt to contact Lufthansa about Lubitz's relapse. Reached by GQ at his clinic in Montabaur, the psychiatrist declined to talk about his treatment of Lubitz.

By early March, Lubitz's thoughts drifted toward death. He searched the Internet for the most efficient means of committing suicide: “producing carbon monoxide”; “drinking gasoline”; “Which poison kills without pain?” On March 18, a Düsseldorf physician wrote a sick-leave note for Lubitz, effective for four days, indicating that Lubitz suffered from “a persistent vision disorder with a thus far unknown origin.” A couple of days later, while at home, a new method of self-extinction took shape in his mind. That evening, March 20, he searched the Internet for information about the locking mechanism on an Airbus A320 cockpit door.

On March 22, the day before returning to work, Lubitz scribbled “Decision Sunday,” along with the flight code BCN, for Barcelona, on a scrap of notebook paper that was later retrieved from the trash in his apartment. Below that heading, Lubitz listed several options: “[find the] inner will to work and continue to live,” “[deal with] stress and sleeplessness,” “let myself go.” On Monday the 23rd, he flew round trip between Düsseldorf and Berlin, and the pilot who traveled with him recalled that his behavior was completely normal. That night, Kathrin—who has said she was unaware of her lover's disintegrating mental state—came home late from work, and the couple went grocery shopping together, buying food for the rest of the week. Early the next morning, Lubitz parked his Audi in a lot at Düsseldorf Airport and climbed into the cockpit for the 7 A.M. outbound flight to Barcelona. The black box from that flight shows that while Sondenheimer was out of the cockpit for a moment, Lubitz briefly switched the plane's automatic pilot to 100 feet, the lowest setting—a test run for the return journey. He switched it back again before any air-traffic controllers had taken notice.

Alone in the cockpit after Sondenheimer left to use the bathroom, Lubitz immediately put his plan into action. He moved the cockpit-door toggle switch, located on a pedestal to the left of his seat, from “normal” to “locked” position, disabling Sondenheimer's emergency access code. Moments later, he reached forward and turned the dial on the automatic pilot to bring the plane down to 100 feet. Just before 10:31 A.M., after crossing the French coast near Toulon, the aircraft left its cruising altitude and began dropping at a rate of 3,500 feet per minute, or 58 feet per second. At this point, the passengers probably sensed a slight dip and a change in pressure, though it's doubtful that it caused any concern. But French air-traffic controllers noticed the unauthorized change and contacted the aircraft. Lubitz didn't reply.

Sondenheimer returned three minutes later, at 10:34. On a keypad outside the cockpit, he punched in his access code, then hit the pound sign. Access denied. “It's me!” he exclaimed, rapping on the door. Flight attendants—preparing to wheel their snack-and-beverage carts down the aisle now that the plane had reached cruising altitude—looked toward the commotion. A closed-circuit camera transmitted the captain's image to a small television screen inside the cockpit; Lubitz didn't react. Alarmed, Sondenheimer started hammering on the door. Still, Lubitz didn't respond. “For the love of God,” the pilot yelled. “Open this door!” The plane was at about 25,000 feet. Passengers, feeling the steep decline now and gripped by the first wave of panic, began leaving their seats and moving through the aisles.

The alarm signaled a shrill “ping-ping-ping,” a warning of approaching ground. Sixty seconds later, the Airbus's right wing clipped the mountainside at 5,000 feet.

At 10:39, Sondenheimer called for a flight attendant to bring him a crowbar hidden in the back of the plane. Grabbing the steel rod, the pilot began smashing the door, then trying to pry and bend it open. The plane had dropped to below 10,000 feet, the snow-encrusted Alps looming closer. Inside the cockpit, Lubitz placed an oxygen mask over his face. “Open this fucking door!” Sondenheimer screamed as passengers stared in bewilderment and mounting terror. Lubitz breathed calmly. At 10:40, an alarm went off: “TERRAIN, TERRAIN! PULL UP, PULL UP!” The plane dipped to 7,000 feet. The alarm signaled a shrill “ping-ping-ping,” a warning of approaching ground. Sixty seconds later, the Airbus's right wing clipped the mountainside at 5,000 feet. The only further sounds picked up by the voice recorder were alarms and screams. Moments later, the jet slammed into the mountain at 403 miles per hour.

Part II: After

At the moment that the first reports of a plane crash in France trickled into the town of Haltern am See, in southwest Germany, Henrik Drüppel was sitting in his 12th-grade English class. “We think something terrible has happened,” the high school principal announced on the intercom system. “School is over. Go home.”

Henrik wandered the corridors in confusion. He noticed teachers huddled together, in tears. Then a friend took him aside and told him that the Germanwings flight from Barcelona had crashed, and that everyone, including his sister, Lea, 15 classmates, and two teachers, had been killed. Several months earlier, the Drüppels had hosted a party for the 16 students from three Spanish classes whose names had been picked out of a hat to go on the weeklong exchange program. Every one of those kids, Henrik realized in horror, was dead.

Henrik and I are standing in Lea's second-floor bedroom in the family's small brick house in Lippramsdorf, a village outside Haltern am See. It's a typical lair of a teenage girl, barely touched since she died: a messy bed, a poster from the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, a stack of Twilight books, plaques with inspirational sayings in German and English (“There can't be a rainbow without rain”), and photos of Lea—pretty and petite—mugging with her friends, including Caja Westermann, who also died in the crash. Henrik points to a small white makeup table with half-full bottles of cosmetics and face creams, scattered as if she had used them that morning. Several jars are sprinkled with black powder, left by forensic specialists who came to gather Lea's fingerprints to help identify some of her remains at the crash site. “I get home from school and it's winter, and it's dark, and the day is over, and nobody is here,” says Henrik, a slight 19-year-old with wire-rimmed glasses and a scruffy beard who resembles a younger Edward Snowden. “Normally I would walk in the door and Lea would be here, and we'd talk, we'd watch television. Now I light a candle, and in my thoughts I maybe tell her my day.”

Henrik's mother, Anne, joins us in the living room. A thin, tired-looking woman of about 50, she sits on the living room sofa and picks up a photo album sent to her by Lea's host family in Barcelona after her death. Wordlessly, she hands it to me. I leaf through dozens of snapshots of teenage kids—most of them now dead—at dinners, at parties, and on rambles through the city's museums and promenades. Anne opens her smartphone to WhatsApp and flips past a photo of Lea's boarding pass for the outbound flight to Barcelona, texts conveying Lea's mock trepidation about flying the low-budget airline, voice recordings in which Lea tries to speak a few words of Spanish (“Adios, Mama”) for her mother over a background of teenage party chatter. Each banal message is now filled with portent.

“How do you put a monetary value on eight minutes of terror?” asks attorney Brian Alexander as we sit in his office at the country's largest aviation-law firm.

I ask Henrik, as gently as I can, if he tries to imagine what Lea experienced during those final eight minutes. After some hesitation, he tells me that he pictures Lea and Caja seated together in the back of the plane, surrounded by classmates and teachers, tired after their last night of partying in Barcelona. “I think that they didn't realize [what was happening] until shortly before,” he says. “And in the last moment, there was probably an adrenaline rush, and then everything—it was instantaneous.”